If so, then according to this functionalist theory, humans can be in pain simply by undergoing C-fiber stimulation. But the theory permits creatures with very different physical constitutions to have mental states as well: if there are silicon-based states of hypothetical Martians or inorganic states of hypothetical androids that also meet these conditions, then these creatures, too, can be in pain. As functionalists often put it, pain can be realized by different types of physical states in different kinds of creatures, or multiply realized.
See entry on multiple realizability. So functionalism is compatible with the sort of dualism that takes mental states to cause, and be caused by, physical states. Still, though functionalism is officially neutral between materialism and dualism, it has been particularly attractive to materialists, since many materialists believe or argue; see Lewis, that it is overwhelmingly likely that any states capable of playing the roles in question will be physical states.
If so, then functionalism can stand as a materialistic alternative to the Psycho-Physical Identity Thesis introduced in Place , Feigl , and Smart , and defended more recently in Hill , and Polger , which holds that each type of mental state is identical with a particular type of neural state.
More recently, however, some philosophers have contended that the identity thesis may be more inclusive than functionalists assume; see Section 6 for further discussion. Within this broad characterization of functionalism, however, a number of distinctions can be made.
One of particular importance is the distinction between theories in which the functional characterizations of mental states purport to provide analyses of the meanings of our mental state terms or otherwise restrict themselves to a priori information , and theories that permit functional characterizations of mental states to appeal to information deriving from scientific experimentation or speculation.
See Shoemaker c, and Rey , for further discussion and more fine-grained distinctions. There are other important differences among functionalist theories as well. These sometimes orthogonal differences, and the motivations for them, can best be appreciated by examining the origins of functionalism and tracing its evolution in response both to explicit criticisms of the thesis and changing views about the nature of psychological explanation.
Although functionalism attained its greatest prominence as a theory of mental states in the last third of the 20th century, it has antecedents in both modern and ancient philosophy, as well as in early theories of computation and artificial intelligence.
The earliest view that can be considered an ancestor of functionalism is Aristotle's theory of the soul BCE. In contrast to Plato's claim that the soul can exist apart from the body, Aristotle argued De Anima Bk. II, Ch. Just as the form of an axe is whatever enables it to cut, and the form of an eye is whatever enables it to see, the human soul is to be identified with whichever powers and capacities enable a natural, organized human body to fulfill its defining function, which, according to Aristotle, is to survive and flourish as a living, acting, perceiving, and reasoning being.
So, Aristotle argues, the soul is inseparable from the body, and comprises whichever capacities are required for a body to live, perceive, reason, and act. See Shields, , and Nelson, , for further debate about whether Aristotle's view can be considered to be a version of functionalism.
A second, relatively early, ancestor of contemporary functionalism is Hobbes's account of reasoning as a kind of computation that proceeds by mechanistic principles comparable to the rules of arithmetic. It was not until the middle of the 20th century, however, that it became common to speculate that thinking may be nothing more than rule-governed computation that can be carried out by creatures of various physical types. In a seminal paper Turing , A.
Other important recent antecedents of functionalism are the behaviorist theories that emerged in the early-to-mid twentieth century. As an empirical psychological theory, behaviorism holds that the behavior of humans and other animals can be explained by appealing solely to behavioral dispositions, that is, to the lawlike tendencies of organisms to behave in certain ways, given certain environmental stimulations.
Behavioral dispositions, unlike thoughts, feelings, and other internal states that can be directly observed only by introspection, are objectively observable and are indisputably part of the natural world. Thus they seemed to be fit entities to figure centrally in the emerging science of psychology. Behaviorism indeed had some early successes, especially in the domain of animal learning, and its principles are still used, at least for heuristic purposes, in various areas of psychology.
But as many psychologists and others, e. Chomsky have argued, the successes of behaviorism seem to depend upon the experimenters' implicit control of certain variables which, when made explicit, involve ineliminable reference to organisms' other mental states. For example, rats are typically placed into an experimental situation at a certain fraction of their normal body weight — and thus can be assumed to feel hunger and to want the food rewards contingent upon behaving in certain ways.
Similarly, it is assumed that humans, in analogous experimental situations, want to cooperate with the experimenters, and understand and know how to follow the instructions. It seemed to the critics of behaviorism, therefore, that theories that explicitly appeal to an organism's beliefs, desires, and other mental states, as well as to stimulations and behavior, would provide a fuller and more accurate account of why organisms behave as they do.
They could do so, moreover, without compromising the objectivity of psychology as long as the mental states to which these theories appeal are introduced as states that together play a role in the production of behavior, rather than states identifiable solely by introspection. Logical behaviorism, in contrast to behaviorism as a psychological theory, is a thesis about the meanings of our mental state terms or concepts. According to logical behaviorism, all statements about mental states and processes are equivalent in meaning to statements about behavioral dispositions.
In addition, logical behaviorists argued that if statements about mental states were equivalent in meaning to statements about behavioral dispositions, there could be an unproblematic account of how mental state terms could be applied both to oneself and others, and how they could be taught and learned. However, as many philosophers have pointed out Chisholm ; Geach , logical behaviorism provides an implausible account of the meanings of our mental state terms, since, intuitively, a subject can have the mental states in question without the relevant behavioral dispositions — and vice versa.
For example, Gene may believe that it's going to rain even if he's not disposed to wear a raincoat and take an umbrella when leaving the house or to perform any other cluster of rain-avoiding behaviors , if Gene doesn't mind, or actively enjoys, getting wet.
And subjects with the requisite motivation can suppress their tendencies to pain behavior even in the presence of excruciating pain, while skilled actors can perfect the lawlike disposition to produce pain behavior under certain conditions, even if they don't actually feel pain. Putnam The problem, these philosophers argued, is that no mental state, by itself, can be plausibly assumed to give rise to any particular behavior unless one also assumes that the subject possesses additional mental states of various types.
And so, it seemed, it was not in fact possible to give meaning-preserving translations of statements invoking pains, beliefs, and desires in purely behavioristic terms. It's important to recognize, however, that there is at least some overlap in the bloodlines of these different strains of functionalism, and also that there are functionalist theories, both earlier and more recent, that fall somewhere in between. Still, it is instructive to give separate treatment to the three major strains of the doctrine, as long as these caveats are kept in mind.
The early functionalist theories of Putnam , can be seen as a response to the difficulties facing behaviorism as a scientific psychological theory, and as an endorsement of the new computational theories of mind which were becoming increasingly significant rivals to it. But see Putnam , for subsequent doubts about machine functionalism, Chalmers b, for a response, and Shagrir , for a comprehensive account of the evolution of Putnam's views on the subject.
A machine table of this sort describes the operation of a deterministic automaton, but most machine state functionalists e. Putnam take the proper model for the mind to be that of a probabilistic automaton: one in which the program specifies, for each state and set of inputs, the probability with which the machine will enter some subsequent state and produce some particular output. These states are not mere behavioral dispositions, since they are specified in terms of their relations not only to inputs and outputs, but also to the state of the machine at the time.
For example, if believing it will rain is regarded as a machine state, it will not be regarded as a disposition to take one's umbrella after looking at the weather report, but rather as a disposition to take one's umbrella if one looks at the weather report and is in the state of wanting to stay dry. So machine state functionalism can avoid what many have thought to be a fatal difficulty for behaviorism.
In addition, machines of this sort provide at least a simple model of how internal states whose effects on output occur by means of mechanical processes can be viewed as representations though the question of what , exactly, they represent has been an ongoing topic of discussion see sections 4. Finally, machine table states are not tied to any particular physical or other realization; the same program, after all, can be run on different sorts of computer hardware.
It's easy to see, therefore, why Turing machines provided a fruitful model for early functionalist theories. However, because machine table states are total states of a system, the early functionalist equation of mental states with machine table states faded in importance as a model for the functional characterization of the complex of distinct internal states that can be simultaneously realized in a human or other subject Block and Fodor ; Putnam Nonetheless, the idea that internal states can be fully described in terms of their relations to input, output, and one another , and can figure in lawlike descriptions, and predictions, of a system's output, was a rich and important idea that is retained by contemporary functionalist theories.
And many functionalists e. Rey argue that mental states are best regarded as computational states but see Piccinini for dissent and the entry The Computational Theory of Mind for a comprehensive discussion of this question.
In contrast to the behaviorists' insistence that the laws of psychology appeal only to behavioral dispositions, cognitive psychologists argue that the best empirical theories of behavior take it to be the result of a complex of mental states and processes, introduced and individuated in terms of the roles they play in producing the behavior to be explained.
For example Fodor's, in his , Ch. On a theory of this sort, what makes some neural process an instance of memory trace decay is a matter of how it functions, or the role it plays, in a cognitive system; its neural or chemical properties are relevant only insofar as they enable that process to do what trace decay is hypothesized to do. And similarly for all mental states and processes invoked by cognitive psychological theories. Psycho-functionalism, therefore, can be seen as straightforwardly adopting the methodology of cognitive psychology in its characterization of mental states and processes as entities defined by their role in a cognitive psychological theory.
All versions of functionalism, however, can be regarded as characterizing mental states in terms of their roles in some psychological theory or other. A more formal account of this will be given in Section 4.
What is distinctive about psycho-functionalism is its claim that mental states and processes are just those entities, with just those properties, postulated by the best scientific explanation of human behavior. It also means that the information used in the functional characterization of mental states and processes needn't be restricted to what is considered common knowledge or common sense, but can include information available only by careful laboratory observation and experimentation. For example, a psychofunctional theory might be able to distinguish phenomena such as depression from sadness or listlessness even though the distinctive causes and effects of these syndromes are difficult to untangle solely by consulting intuitions or appealing to common sense.
And psychofunctional theories will not include characterizations of mental states for which there is no scientific evidence, such as buyer's regret or hysteria, even if the existence and efficacy of such states is something that common sense affirms.
This may seem to be an unmitigated advantage, since psycho-functional theories can avail themselves of all the tools of inquiry available to scientific psychology, and will presumably make all, and only, the distinctions that are scientifically sound. Many psycho-functionalists may not regard this as an unhappy consequence, and argue that it's appropriate to treat only those who are psychologically similar as having the same mental states.
This is because, for analytic functionalists, there are equally important goals that require strictly a priori characterizations of mental states. Analytic functionalism, of course, has richer resources than logical behaviorism for such translations, since it permits reference to the causal relations that a mental state has to stimulations, behavior, and other mental states.
A good way to see why analytic functionalists insist that functional characterizations provide meaning analyses is to revisit a debate that occurred in the early days of the Psycho-Physical Identity Theory, the thesis that each type of mental state can be identified with some type of brain state or neural activity.
For example, early identity theorists e. Smart argued that it makes perfect sense and may well be true to identify pain with C-fiber stimulation. And just because I need not consult some sort of brain scanner when reporting that I'm in pain doesn't mean that the pain I report is not a neural state that a brain scanner could in principle detect.
An important — and enduring — objection to this argument, however, was raised early on by Max Black reported in Smart See White and , for more recent versions of this argument, and Block , for a response. The appeal of meaning-preserving functional characterizations, therefore, is that in providing topic-neutral equivalents of our mental state terms and concepts, they blunt the anti-materialistic force of the Distinct Property Argument.
But if there are functional descriptions that preserve the meanings of these terms, then a creature's mental states can be identified simply by determining which of that creature's internal states and processes play the relevant functional roles see Lewis And since the capacity to play these roles is merely a matter of having certain causal relations to stimulations, behavior, and one another, the possession of these properties is compatible with a materialistic theory of the mind.
A major question, of course, is whether a theory that limits itself to a priori information about the causal relations between stimulations, mental states, and behavior can make the right distinctions among mental states. This question will be pursued further in Section 4. There is yet another distinction between kinds of functional theory — one that crosscuts the distinctions described so far — that is important to note.
To see the difference between these types of theory, consider—once again—the avowedly simplistic example of a functional theory of pain introduced in the first section.
As noted earlier, if in humans this functional role is played by C-fiber stimulation, then, according to this functionalist theory, humans can be in pain simply by undergoing C-fiber stimulation. But there is a further question to be answered, namely, what is the property of pain itself?
Role functionalists identify pain with that higher-level relational property. Realizer functionalists, however, take a functional theory merely to provide definite descriptions of whichever lower-level properties satisfy the functional characterizations.
However, if there are differences in the physical states that satisfy the functional definitions in different actual or hypothetical creatures, such theories—like most versions of the identity theory—would violate a key motivation for functionalism, namely, that creatures with states that play the same role in the production of other mental states and behavior possess, literally, the same mental states. It may be that there are some important, more general, physical similarities between the neural states of seemingly disparate creatures that satisfy a given functional characterization see Bechtel and Mundale , Churchland , and Polger and Shapiro, —but see Aizawa and Gillett, for dissent; this issue will be discussed further in Section 6.
One could counter the charge of chauvinism, of course, by suggesting that all creatures with lower-level states that satisfy a given functional characterization possess a common lower-level disjunctive state or property. But neither alternative, for many functionalists, goes far enough to preserve the basic functionalist intuition that functional commonality trumps physical diversity in determining whether creatures can possess the same mental states. On the other hand, some functionalists—here, too, both a priori and empirical—consider realizer functionalism to be in a better position than role functionalism to explain the causal efficacy of the mental.
If I stub my toe and wince, we believe that my toe stubbing causes my pain, which in turn causes my wincing. But, some have argued Malcolm ; Kim , , if pain is realized in me by some neural event-type, then insofar as there are purely physical law-like generalizations linking events of that type with wincings, one can give a complete causal explanation of my wincing by citing the occurrence of that neural event and the properties by virtue of which it figures in those laws.
And thus it seems that the higher-level role properties of that event are causally irrelevant. This problem will be discussed further in Section 5.
So far, the discussion of how to provide functional characterizations of individual mental states has been vague, and the examples avowedly simplistic.
Is it possible to do better, and, if so, which version of functionalism is likely to have the greatest success? Nonetheless I will discuss them separately to focus on what all agree to be the distinctive features of each. First, however, it is important to get more precise about how exactly functional definition is supposed to work. This can be done by focusing on a general method for constructing functional definitions introduced by David Lewis ; building on an idea of Frank Ramsey's , which has become standard practice for functionalists of all varieties.
Articulating this method will help in evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the different varieties of functionalism—while displaying some further challenges that arise for them all. The key feature of this now-canonical method is to treat mental states and processes as being implicitly defined by the Ramsey sentence of one or another psychological theory — common sense, scientific, or something in between.
Analogous steps, of course, can be taken to produce the Ramsey-sentence of any theory, psychological or otherwise. For a still simplistic example, consider the sort of generalizations about pain introduced before: pain tends to be caused by bodily injury; pain tends to produce the belief that something is wrong with the body and the desire to be out of that state; pain tends to produce anxiety; pain tends to produce wincing or moaning.
Such a statement is free of any mental state terms. It includes only quantifiers that range over mental states, terms that denote stimulations and behavior, and terms that specify various causal relations among them. It can thus be regarded as providing implicit definitions of the mental state terms of the theory. An individual will have those mental states just in case it possesses a family of first-order states that interact in the ways specified by the theory.
Though functionalists of course acknowledge that the first-order states that satisfy the functional definitions may vary from species to species — or even from individual to individual — they specify that, for each individual, the functional definitions be uniquely satisfied.
This makes it clear that, in the classic formulations of functional theories, mental states are intended to be characterized in terms of their relations to stimulations, behavior, and all the other states that may be permissibly invoked by the theory in question, and thus certain functional theories may have more resources for individuating mental states than suggested by the crude definitions used as examples. The next three sections will discuss the potential of various sorts of functionalist theory for giving adequate characterizations of experiential and intentional states—and also for specifying the inputs and outputs of the system.
So, for example, the experience of a very reddish-orange could be partially characterized as the state produced by the viewing of a color swatch within some particular range, which tends to produce the judgment or belief that the state just experienced is more similar to the experience of red than of orange.
Analogous characterizations, of course, will have to be given of these other color experiences. The judgments or beliefs in question will themselves be partially characterized in terms of their tendencies to produce sorting or categorization behavior of certain specified kinds. This strategy may seem fatal to analytic functionalism, which restricts itself to the use of a priori information to distinguish among mental states, since it's not clear that the information needed to distinguish among experiences such as color perceptions will result from conceptual analysis of our mental state terms or concepts.
However, this problem may not be as dire as it seems. There are limits to this strategy, however see Section 5. To switch, however, would be to give up the benefits if any of a theory that offers meaning-preserving translations of our mental state terms.
There has been significant skepticism, however, about whether any functionalist theory — analytic or scientific — can capture what seems to be the distinctive qualitative character of experiential states such as color perceptions, pains, and other bodily sensations; these questions will be addressed in section 5.
Strawson , Horgan and Tienson , Kriegel , and Pitt , who suggest that intentional states have qualitative character as well. We can begin by characterizing beliefs as among other things states produced in certain ways by sense-perception or inference from other beliefs, and desires as states with certain causal or counterfactual relations to the system's goals and needs, and specify further how according to the relevant common sense or empirical theory beliefs and desires tend to interact with one another, and other mental states, to produce behavior.
Social facts are the laws, morals, values, religious beliefs, customs, fashions, rituals, and all of the cultural rules that govern social life Durkheim Each of these social facts serves one or more functions within a society. Another noted structural functionalist, Robert Merton — , pointed out that social processes often have many functions. Manifest functions are the consequences of a social process that are sought or anticipated, while latent functions are the unsought consequences of a social process.
A manifest function of college education, for example, includes gaining knowledge, preparing for a career, and finding a good job that utilizes that education.
Latent functions of your college years include meeting new people, participating in extracurricular activities, or even finding a spouse or partner. Another latent function of education is creating a hierarchy of employment based on the level of education attained.
Latent functions can be beneficial, neutral, or harmful. Social processes that have undesirable consequences for the operation of society are called dysfunctions. In education, examples of dysfunction include getting bad grades, truancy, dropping out, not graduating, and not finding suitable employment. Also problematic is the somewhat circular nature of this theory; repetitive behavior patterns are assumed to have a function, yet we profess to know that they have a function only because they are repeated.
Many sociologists now believe that functionalism is no longer useful as a macro-level theory, but that it does serve a useful purpose in some mid-level analyses. Some sociologists see the online world contributing to the creation of an emerging global culture. By contrast, he observed that, in modern societies, traditional family bonds are weaker; modern societies also exhibit a complex division of labor, where members perform very different daily tasks.
Durkheim argued that modern industrial society would destroy the traditional mechanical solidarity that held primitive societies together. Modern societies however, do not fall apart. Instead, modern societies rely on organic solidarity; because of the extensive division of labor, members of society are forced to interact and exchange with one another to provide the things they need. The functionalist perspective continues to try and explain how societies maintained the stability and internal cohesion necessary to ensure their continued existence over time.
In the functionalist perspective, societies are thought to function like organisms, with various social institutions working together like organs to maintain and reproduce them. The various parts of society are assumed to work together naturally and automatically to maintain overall social equilibrium. Because social institutions are functionally integrated to form a stable system, a change in one institution will precipitate a change in other institutions.
Dysfunctional institutions, which do not contribute to the overall maintenance of a society, will cease to exist. In the s, Robert Merton elaborated the functionalist perspective by proposing a distinction between manifest and latent functions.
Manifest functions are the intended functions of an institution or a phenomenon in a social system. Functionalism does not encourage people to take an active role in changing their social environment, even when doing so may benefit them.
Instead, functionalism sees agitating for social change as undesirable because the various parts of society will compensate in a seemingly organic way for any problems that may arise.
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